I'm overseeing the creation of an e-commerce website for a liquor wholesaler and I need to create a mock-up by this weekend. There don't seem to be many alcohol wholesalers/suppliers with an online shop and the ones that do exist aren't very user friendly. I am planning on making one in which the items are displayed on the home page but I'm concerned that this might not be appropriate for a B2B situations Any suggestions or references would be great!
Will the online shop be exclusively b2b? Or a mixture of b2b & b2c? Personally, I really like http://danmurphys.com.au/dm/home.jsp but they are not a wholesaler. An Australian liquor wholesaler https://www.almliquor.com.au/ A lot of wholesalers (regardless of the industry) still operate in the old ways, and totally ignore UI and UXD. Personally if I was making a ecommerce b2b liquor site it would be similar to DanMurphy's, but without the pricing (visible only on log-in, or call for pricing options). Working for a larger retailer, most of our suppliers (wholesalers) have terrible websites. Display items on the home page and have them assigned into proper categories (like any decent B2C online store) would be much better and make us buy more/faster.
How many items to they sell? Homepage would be fine IMO. Definitely the appropriate place for promoting sales and stock clearance. However, with any wholesaler the prices probably aren't public. They may also be unique to the retailer / buyer, so that might be worth taking into consideration.